As co-directors of the project, Sheila Brennan and I are really very honored by the award. The folks at NCPH are our people and understand the importance of our project goals and objectives in a way that non-public historians often do not.

As a result of the award, we’ve had the opportunity to write up the project:

All of these materials make clear that the planning and execution of successful digital public history work is equal parts technical and social. The nuts and bolts of how to set-up and shape a site are one thing–a thing that lots of people need help with. But, it seems to me that the more important thing is always the social–the testing, the collaboration, the outreach, the evaluation, and the sharing of the lessons learned.

As more public historians do this work, I’d love to see a growing library of guides and reflections. Perhaps something for History@Work to aggregate in the library?

I’ve been steadily making progress on my current project for about 8 weeks now, and I find myself writing a lot about the people who use digital public history websites and applications. The problem is, I can’t figure out what to call those people.

The traditional options include user, visitor, and audience. To me, user and visitor seem unnecessarily vague, but audience is even worse because it bakes in a sense of passive reception that just doesn’t reflect reality when so much of the web is interactive and participatory.

Given this dissatisfaction, I turned to the OED thesaurus for a little inspiration. Sadly, I found none.

user: handler; utilizer

visitor: comer; repairer; resorter; visitant; guest; caller

audience: spectators; listeners; viewers; onlookers

There are several other options that arise when we consider the idea that we might want to create dialogic experiences with our digital public history work:

partner

participant

contributor

volunteer

community member

Of these, I like community member best, but that doesn’t leave much room for the notion of reaching new people who might not already be invested in the work.

In the course of a twitter conversation, Tom Scheinfeldt suggested that he is trying to use “people-first” constructions: people who engage with the site; people who contribute content; etc. That definitely has some appeal — to talk about what people do, rather than who they are — but I worry that it’s too easy to lose the essential role that social context plays in shaping the ways that those people interact with work.

So, I offer this question to the wisdom of the crowd (another term I don’t like).

How should we refer to the people who engage with our digital public history work?

(… or what I’m doing with my sabbatical. I’d be quite pleased for comments and/or tips on publishers who would like to manage a review process on project with an open-access web scholarship component.)

The Need

The work of public history calls for taking good history scholarship into the world to meet the needs and interests of a non-academic audience. While much of that work has traditionally happened in face-to-face encounters and at physical sites, increasingly public historians are encountering their audiences through digital means, such as social media, blogs, exhibit sites, collection and archives sites, mobile applications, and digital simulations. The possibilities for doing sophisticated digital public history work have expanded significantly since the first cultural heritage organizations began to create websites in the mid-1990s. At the same time, the core elements and challenges of doing rigorous public history work have not changed all that much. As a result, the best digital public history work requires a blend of applied technical skills, targeted engagement strategies, disciplinary ways of knowing, and deep content knowledge.

Unfortunately much of the existing writing on digital public history fails to take into consideration the necessary blend of concerns. The only concentrated guide to doing digital history is ten years old, and cannot account for the ways that hardware, software, and the uses of technology have changed since its publication (Cohen and Rosenzweig, 2005). Furthermore, the most recent edited collection focused on digital history only includes one essay that addresses public history (Nawrotzki and Dougherty, 2013).

In recent years, the publishing landscape has been flooded by edited collections addressing digital humanities (see below), and museum and archives computing issues (Din and Hecht, 2007; Marty and Jones, 2007; Theimer, 2011). By dwelling in necessarily interdisciplinary spaces, these collections cannot speak to the disciplinary distinctions that separate history from the other humanities disciplines, to say nothing of the ways that the work that takes place within public history institutions is different from that which occurs in art museums, children’s museums, and science centers. These edited collections gather together slim glimpses of the arc of theories and methods that must be marshaled to do digital public history. The essays contained within often provide case studies of particular projects and pose provocative questions about emerging technologies and individual methods (Adair, et al., 2010; Boyd and Larson, 2014; Ridge, 2014). The result is a scatter-shot discussion of issues that require much more concerted attention. Taken in the aggregate, these collections and the essays they contain do not provide the practitioner or the student with a comprehensive overview of what is required to plan and execute rigorous digital public history work.

While there is promising work being created in a number of sectors, none of it provides the full background and resources public historians need. Guides to using particular technologies are not sufficiently framed with public audiences or collaborators in mind (Graham, et al., 2013). History monographs attuned to particular content areas show little to no attention to addressing a public audience or the digital means by which that communication might take place. Cognitive science research on the process of teaching and learning historical thinking skills rarely appears on the horizon of technologists or historians. And, business sector advice columns on market research, digital strategy, web design principles, and social media campaigns are off-putting to those primarily concerned with communicating about the past and its significance.

Public historians need a practical introduction to doing digital public history that speaks to their theoretical and methodological commitments while offering guidance on preparing for, executing, and sustaining vibrant projects.

The Opportunity

User-Centered Digital History, an open-access, responsive website, will offer a clear introduction for practicing public historians, those who teach public history, and their students, who want to embark on digital work.

Bringing together the core areas of expertise in applied technical skills, targeted engagement strategies, disciplinary-specific ways of knowing, and historical content knowledge, the site will be composed of ten web modules that allow the visitor to selectively drill into the topics and issues that are most pertinent for her work. Materials on the site will be arranged so that the user quickly can get an overview of the topic and can access the key principles for each module, but then have the ability to proceed to more in-depth discussions of particular approaches, tools, and activities. Where appropriate, the modules will include support documents, project case studies, and other associated resources.

The introductory portion of the website will frame public history and digital history as fields within the discipline of history. They have distinct genealogies and methods that distinguish them from the larger worlds of both history and the digital humanities, and that are important for the ways that technology is employed in their service. Then, the site zeroes in on the main distinction between public history and other forms of history: it is created with and for a particular audience. This notion of user-centered history is the key factor that makes digital public history stand apart both from academic digital history and other work in digital humanities. As such, it is central to all of the other facets of the work.

The remainder of the site is divided into three sets of modules that address planning, executing, and sustaining digital public history projects. Thus, the first set of modules covers the research, strategy, and infrastructure creation that are necessary to lay the groundwork for successful projects. The second set addresses the practical and theoretical issues involved in executing a wide range of digital public history work, including building digital collections, creating rich interpretive content, and creating engaged communities around that work. The final set treats the need for frequent evaluation, ongoing outreach campaigns, and consistent attention to digital preservation.